Heroes and History

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: July 17, 2007
=================

I spent the first four days of last week interviewing senators about Iraq. The mood ranged from despondency to despair. Then on Friday I went to the Roosevelt Room in the White House to hear President Bush answer questions on the same subject. It was like entering a different universe.

Far from being beleaguered, Bush was assertive and good-humored. While some in his administration may be looking for exit strategies, he is unshakably committed to stabilizing Iraq. If Gen. David Petraeus comes back and says he needs more troops and more time, Bush will scrounge up the troops. If GeneralPetraeus says he can get by with fewer, Bush will support that, too.

Bush said he will get General Petraeus’s views unfiltered by the Pentagon establishment. He feels no need to compromise to head off opposition from Capitol Hill and is confident that he can rebuild popular support. “I have the tools,” he said.

I left the 110-minute session thinking that far from being worn down by the past few years, Bush seems empowered. His self-confidence is the most remarkable feature of his presidency.

All this will be taken as evidence by many that Bush is delusional. He’s living in a cocoon. He doesn’t see or can’t face how badly the war is going and how awfully he has performed.

But Bush is not blind to the realities in Iraq. After all, he lives through the events we’re not supposed to report on: the trips to Walter Reed, the hours and hours spent weeping with or being rebuffed by the families of the dead.

Rather, his self-confidence survives because it flows from two sources. The first is his unconquerable faith in the rightness of his Big Idea. Bush is convinced that history is moving in the direction of democracy, or as he said Friday: “It’s more of a theological perspective. I do believe there is an Almighty, and I believe a gift of that Almighty to all is freedom. And I will tell you that is a principle that no one can convince me that doesn’t exist.”

Second, Bush remains energized by the power of the presidency. Some presidents complain about the limits of the office. But Bush, despite all the setbacks, retains a capacious view of the job and its possibilities.

Conservatives are supposed to distrust government, but Bush clearly loves the presidency. Or to be more precise, he loves leadership. He’s convinced leaders have the power to change societies. Even in a place as chaotic as Iraq, good leadership makes all the difference.

When Bush is asked about military strategy, he talks about the leadership qualities of his top generals. Before, it was Generals Abizaid and Casey. Now, it’s Generals Petraeus and Odierno.

When Bush talks about world affairs more generally, he talks about national leaders. When he is asked to analyze Iraq, he talks about Maliki. With Russia, it’s Putin. With Europe, it’s Merkel, Sarkozy, Brown and the rest.

He is confident in his ability to read other leaders: Who has courage? Who has a chip on his shoulder? And he is confident that in reading the individual character of leaders, he is reading the tablet that really matters. History is driven by the club of those in power. When far-sighted leaders change laws and institutions, they have the power to transform people.

Many will doubt this, but Bush is a smart and compelling presence in person, and only the whispering voice of Leo Tolstoy holds one back.

Tolstoy had a very different theory of history. Tolstoy believed great leaders are puffed-up popinjays. They think their public decisions shape history, but really it is the everyday experiences of millions of people which organically and chaotically shape the destiny of nations — from the bottom up.

According to this view, societies are infinitely complex. They can’t be understood or directed by a group of politicians in the White House or the Green Zone. Societies move and breathe on their own, through the jostling of mentalities and habits. Politics is a thin crust on the surface of culture. Political leaders can only play a tiny role in transforming a people, especially when the integral fabric of society has dissolved.

If Bush’s theory of history is correct, the right security plan can lead to safety, the right political compromises to stability. But if Tolstoy is right, then the future of Iraq is beyond the reach of global summits, political benchmarks and the understanding of any chief executive.

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The Opinionator: A blog at the New York Times by Tobin Harshaw & Chris Suellenthorp

July 16, 2007, 4:21 pm

He Can’t Get Started

By Chris Suellentrop

Tags: Elections 2008, John Edwards

Is John Edwards the Democratic version of John McCain? Four years ago, that would have been considered a favorable comparison. Not anymore. “Outside of McCain, no top-shelf presidential candidate had a more difficult first six months than Edwards did,” say the members of the NBC News political unit who put together the First Read blog for MSNBC.com. “He raised less than half what Clinton and Obama pulled in; his candidacy lacks some of the buzz and luster his first one did; and his campaign (with the stories about $400 haircuts and his work for a hedge fund) has lost control of his image.”

Would Edwards’s campaign be helped by a different debate format? Edwards’s wife, Elizabeth, says her husband wants to thin the roster of candidates during the overcrowded debates. Fewer debaters would equal more debate, Mrs. Edwards suggests. She writes in a post at the Democratic activist site MyDD.com:

John meant what he said in Iowa: he wants smaller groups (or longer debates) so that there can be an end to the notion that a candidate can skate through the debates with sound bite answers. Everyone has sixty seconds to explain their [health] care plan and John’s truly universal plan ends up sounding just like a “plan” to talk about health care. It does a disservice to the voters. Since no one (maybe not even the candidates’ spouses!) would watch a three hour debate, it seems more sensible to have a series of randomly constituted smaller groups.

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Hard to Figure: The Drab Legacy of Jottin’ Joe

Aki Jones, a security guard, with the DiMaggio
“diaries” at Gallagher’s Steak House Monday.

By CLYDE HABERMAN

Published: July 17, 2007
=================

Whitey Ford, who really should be introduced as the incomparable Whitey Ford, wore a somewhat quizzical look yesterday as the books were spread across a table where he sat in a Midtown restaurant.

On second thought, calling them books endows them with an ill-deserved loftiness. They were binders, 29 of them, filled with more than 2,400 pages of jottings by one of the most magnificent players ever to fill a baseball uniform, Joe DiMaggio of the New York Yankees. Steiner Sports, a Westchester company that trades in sports memorabilia, has bought these jottings and now plans to sell them.

Call them diaries or journals, if you wish. But those words, too, might be lofty.

Page after page, they are DiMaggio’s summaries of his daily activities from 1982 to 1993. Judging from the samples that Steiner Sports made available, there seems little likelihood of anyone’s stumbling upon Proustian insights. These notes lean heavily toward the humdrum: “Monday, December 12, 1983. Up at 7 a.m. Had breakfast in coffee shop at 8 a.m.” At the bottom of many pages, he itemized his expenses for the day — $87 that Dec. 12, most of it for taxis.

DiMaggio began tracking his spending for tax purposes but came over time to use the summaries to “convey his feelings and emotions,” Steiner Sports said. Typically, he wrote on stationery cadged from hotels or airlines. He was notoriously — how to put it kindly? — frugal. The man tossed quarters around as if they were manhole covers.

We’re willing to bet that on Dec. 12, 1983, millions of people woke up at 7 in the morning and had breakfast at 8. But millions of people were not Joe DiMaggio, who died in 1999 at 84. Steiner Sports is betting that enough potential buyers are out there to bring in at least $1.5 million at auction, and maybe $3 million or more.

In this era of celebrity worship — can you imagine what Paris Hilton’s prison uniform might fetch? — anything goes. “People want artifacts,” said Brandon Steiner, the company’s chief executive.

To announce its plans, the company held a news conference yesterday at Gallagher’s Steak House, a DiMaggio haunt. The choice of July 16 was presumably no accident. On July 16, 1941, DiMaggio hit safely in his 56th consecutive game. That streak, which ended the next day, remains baseball’s gold standard for batting consistency.

Whitey Ford, the great Yankee pitcher and no stranger himself to making a buck on his glory years, was asked to join the show. He and DiMaggio were teammates for a short time in 1950, he at the dawn of his major league career, DiMaggio at the twilight of his.

Mr. Ford, looking fit at 78, sat at a table while the stacks of binders were laid out in front of him. He seemed taken aback. “This is all new to me,” he said. “I didn’t know this stuff existed until a couple of days ago.”

And what would DiMaggio have thought about his personal musings being put up for auction?

“He was a very, very private man,” Mr. Ford replied. “I don’t know if Joe would be too tickled about this.”

DiMaggio’s desire to preserve his privacy was legendary. “He did everything right,” Mr. Ford said, “except he just couldn’t open up.”

THAT thought raises an inevitable question about the propriety of turning a profit on the personal writings of a man who, though always interested in cash, kept to himself. Nor is this is an isolated situation. You may remember Sotheby’s 1999 auction of letters written by the hermitic J. D. Salinger.

Steiner Sports bought the DiMaggio papers from Morris Engelberg, who was DiMaggio’s lawyer and did just fine for himself with that association. The purchase price was not disclosed. But on the correctness of the deal, the company’s executives pronounced themselves to be on the side of the angels.

“I think at some point, he knew that these would get out,” Jared Weiss, the company’s president, said of DiMaggio. Mr. Steiner said that Mr. Engelberg took “a lot of direction” from DiMaggio. “At the end of the day,” he said, “if Joe really didn’t want these to come out, Morris would have known it.”

That may be. But few of us standing on the outside looking in are ever likely to know for sure. Whitey Ford, for one, sounded uncertain.

Once more, someone asked him what he thought DiMaggio might have felt about his papers going on the block. “I don’t know,” Mr. Ford said. “He was a tough man to understand.”

E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com

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The O

July 16, 2007, 4:21 pm

He Can’t Get Started

By Chris Suellentrop

Tags: Elections 2008, John Edwards

Is John Edwards the Democratic version of John McCain? Four years ago, that would have been considered a favorable comparison. Not anymore. “Outside of McCain, no top-shelf presidential candidate had a more difficult first six months than Edwards did,” say the members of the NBC News political unit who put together the First Read blog for MSNBC.com. “He raised less than half what Clinton and Obama pulled in; his candidacy lacks some of the buzz and luster his first one did; and his campaign (with the stories about $400 haircuts and his work for a hedge fund) has lost control of his image.”

Would Edwards’s campaign be helped by a different debate format? Edwards’s wife, Elizabeth, says her husband wants to thin the roster of candidates during the overcrowded debates. Fewer debaters would equal more debate, Mrs. Edwards suggests. She writes in a post at the Democratic activist site MyDD.com:

John meant what he said in Iowa: he wants smaller groups (or longer debates) so that there can be an end to the notion that a candidate can skate through the debates with sound bite answers. Everyone has sixty seconds to explain their [health] care plan and John’s truly universal plan ends up sounding just like a “plan” to talk about health care. It does a disservice to the voters. Since no one (maybe not even the candidates’ spouses!) would watch a three hour debate, it seems more sensible to have a series of randomly constituted smaller groups.

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The Opinionator: A blog at the New York Times by Tobin Harshaw & Chris Suellenthorp

July 16, 2007, 9:53 am

News Still Has the Blues

By Chris Suellentrop

Tags: media

The real digital divide: Information inequality of the voluntary sort, not involuntary income inequality, is “[t]he new fault line of civic involvement,” says Princeton professor of politics and public affairs Markus Prior. The author of “Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections,” Prior writes on the op-ed page of The Washington Post:

The new fault line of civic involvement is between news junkies and entertainment fans. Entertainment fans are abandoning news and politics not because it has become harder to be involved but because they have decided to devote their time to content that promises greater immediate gratification. As a result, they learn less about politics and are less likely to vote at a time when news junkies are becoming even more engaged. Unlike most forms of inequality, this rising divergence in political involvement is a result of voluntary consumption decisions. Making sure everybody has access to media won’t fix the problem — it is exactly the cause.

“Decades into the ‘information age,’ the public is as uninformed as before the rise of cable television and the Internet,” Prior writes. He adds, “Unfortunately for a political system that benefits from an informed citizenry, few people really like the news.”

Even though there are fewer readers and viewers of news than ever, aggregate news consumption hasn’t decreased, Prior says, because of the rise of the “news junkie.” (That’s you, Opinionator readers.) Prior explains:

A relatively small segment of the population — my own research indicates it’s less than a fifth — specializes in news content. But such people consume so much of it that the total amount of time Americans spend watching, reading and listening to news has not declined even though many people have tuned out.

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The Waiting Game

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: July 16, 2007
=================

Being without health insurance is no big deal. Just ask President Bush. “I mean, people have access to health care in America,” he said last week. “After all, you just go to an emergency room.”

This is what you might call callousness with consequences. The White House has announced that Mr. Bush will veto a bipartisan plan that would extend health insurance, and with it such essentials as regular checkups and preventive medical care, to an estimated 4.1 million currently uninsured children. After all, it’s not as if those kids really need insurance — they can just go to emergency rooms, right?

O.K., it’s not news that Mr. Bush has no empathy for people less fortunate than himself. But his willful ignorance here is part of a larger picture: by and large, opponents of universal health care paint a glowing portrait of the American system that bears as little resemblance to reality as the scare stories they tell about health care in France, Britain, and Canada.

The claim that the uninsured can get all the care they need in emergency rooms is just the beginning. Beyond that is the myth that Americans who are lucky enough to have insurance never face long waits for medical care.

Actually, the persistence of that myth puzzles me. I can understand how people like Mr. Bush or Fred Thompson, who declared recently that “the poorest Americans are getting far better service” than Canadians or the British, can wave away the desperation of uninsured Americans, who are often poor and voiceless. But how can they get away with pretending that insured Americans always get prompt care, when most of us can testify otherwise?

A recent article in Business Week put it bluntly: “In reality, both data and anecdotes show that the American people are already waiting as long or longer than patients living with universal health-care systems.”

A cross-national survey conducted by the Commonwealth Fund found that America ranks near the bottom among advanced countries in terms of how hard it is to get medical attention on short notice (although Canada was slightly worse), and that America is the worst place in the advanced world if you need care after hours or on a weekend.

We look better when it comes to seeing a specialist or receiving elective surgery. But Germany outperforms us even on those measures — and I suspect that France, which wasn’t included in the study, matches Germany’s performance.

Besides, not all medical delays are created equal. In Canada and Britain, delays are caused by doctors trying to devote limited medical resources to the most urgent cases. In the United States, they’re often caused by insurance companies trying to save money.

This can lead to ordeals like the one recently described by Mark Kleiman, a professor at U.C.L.A., who nearly died of cancer because his insurer kept delaying approval for a necessary biopsy. “It was only later,” writes Mr. Kleiman on his blog, “that I discovered why the insurance company was stalling; I had an option, which I didn’t know I had, to avoid all the approvals by going to ‘Tier II,’ which would have meant higher co-payments.”

He adds, “I don’t know how many people my insurance company waited to death that year, but I’m certain the number wasn’t zero.”

To be fair, Mr. Kleiman is only surmising that his insurance company risked his life in an attempt to get him to pay more of his treatment costs. But there’s no question that some Americans who seemingly have good insurance nonetheless die because insurers are trying to hold down their “medical losses” — the industry term for actually having to pay for care.

On the other hand, it’s true that Americans get hip replacements faster than Canadians. But there’s a funny thing about that example, which is used constantly as an argument for the superiority of private health insurance over a government-run system: the large majority of hip replacements in the United States are paid for by, um, Medicare.

That’s right: the hip-replacement gap is actually a comparison of two government health insurance systems. American Medicare has shorter waits than Canadian Medicare (yes, that’s what they call their system) because it has more lavish funding — end of story. The alleged virtues of private insurance have nothing to do with it.

The bottom line is that the opponents of universal health care appear to have run out of honest arguments. All they have left are fantasies: horror fiction about health care in other countries, and fairy tales about health care here in America.

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He Rang the Alarm on Darfur

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: July 16, 2007
====================

Some day an American president will visit a genocide museum in Darfur and repeat the standard refrain: If only we had known ...

But that excuse will ring hollow, because there was a whistle-blower in the heart of the Bush administration. Roger Winter, whom President Bush had appointed in 2001 to a senior post in the U.S. Agency for International Development, frantically tried to ring alarm bells — but instead the administration turned away.

If there was a hero within the U.S. government on Darfur, it was Mr. Winter. But it was doubly frustrating for him because in 1994 he had the same experience during the Clinton administration, when he was running a refugee organization and desperately trying to galvanize officials to respond to the Rwandan genocide.

In outrage at Bill Clinton’s inaction during the Rwandan slaughter, Mr. Winter abandoned the Democratic Party and became a Republican.

Mr. Winter, 65, who also served in the Carter and (briefly) Reagan administrations, traveled regularly to Sudan for the Bush administration, trying to end the 20-year war between northern and southern Sudan. On those trips, Mr. Winter encountered the slaughter in Darfur as it began.

In May 2003, long before any newspaper noticed, Mr. Winter warned in Congressional testimony that violence was erupting in Darfur. Then, on Nov. 3, 2003, the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum transmitted a message warning Washington that “the situation in Darfur is critical” and adding that “ethnic cleansing ... is underway.”

But Washington shrugged.

State Department officials apparently worried that an uproar over Darfur would derail the north-south agreement in Sudan, a prize achievement for the Bush administration. So they looked away. The State Department was even angry when the Agency for International Development released satellite photos showing the burned villages in Darfur.

Before testifying to Congress, Mr. Winter had to submit prepared remarks to the State Department for vetting. Frustrated by State’s passivity, he used his off-the-cuff remarks to speak passionately — and uncensored — about the horrors in Darfur.

Mr. Winter once took an administration colleague with him to fly over Darfur from Chad, to show him the Janjaweed militias as they burned villages. Administration officials aren’t supposed to invade another country’s air space and buzz militias as they slaughter civilians, but Mr. Winter was desperate to get another administration witness.

“We were trying to get everybody’s attention, including the White House and State Department and everybody else,” Mr. Winter recalls.

When Sudanese forces blocked a road to aid groups, Mr. Winter invited aid groups to join his own convoy and insisted on going down the road to assure humanitarian access.

It was agonizing, he says, to feel that Mr. Bush wanted to do the right thing on Sudan — and yet see the administration acquiesce on mass murder. Later Mr. Winter served as State Department envoy for Darfur, but at State he burned with the same frustration and retired last year, deeply disillusioned.

“Khartoum looked the U.S. in the eye, and we looked away,” Mr. Winter said, adding: “There was no real intention of taking effective action. They saw that. They read us. And so they weren’t threatened.”

Mr. Winter favored — and still favors — a no-fly zone over Darfur. We wouldn’t keep planes in the air, or even shoot planes down. But after Sudan bombed civilians in Darfur, we would later destroy a Sudanese attack helicopter on the ground.

Aid groups worry that such a strike would endanger their efforts. But I think Mr. Winter, who has 26 years’ experience in Sudan, is exactly right that a no-fly zone is the best way to shake up Sudanese officials and make them negotiate seriously for a peace agreement in Darfur.

“What we have done with our handling of Darfur is show Khartoum that in certain circumstances we are a toothless tiger,” he says. “No matter how forceful the words we use, we don’t act. Or we act in ways that the bad guys in Khartoum find tolerable. ... It tells them that they can get away with mass murder.”

The upshot, Mr. Winter believes, is that Sudan is increasingly likely to resume its war against southern Sudan, erasing one of Mr. Bush’s genuine achievements. Mr. Winter says of administration officials, “They’re turning a silk purse into a sow’s ear.”

Mr. Winter admires Mr. Bush for pushing for north-south peace but fears that the administration is simply running out the clock on Darfur. “Where we have gotten to with Sudan,” he says heavily, “is a tragedy.”

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When 3 Really Is a Crowd

By ELIZABETH MARQUARDT

Published: July 16, 2007
====================

Chicago

SOMETIMES when the earth shudders it doesn’t make a sound. That’s what happened in Harrisburg, Pa., recently.

On April 30, a state Superior Court panel ruled that a child can have three legal parents. The case, Jacob v. Shultz-Jacob, involved two lesbians who were the legal co-parents of two children conceived with sperm donated by a friend. The panel held that the sperm donor and both women were all liable for child support. Arthur S. Leonard, a professor at New York Law School, observed, “I’m unaware of any other state appellate court that has found that a child has, simultaneously, three adults who are financially obligated to the child’s support and are also entitled to visitation.”

The case follows a similar decision handed down by a provincial court in Ontario in January. In what appeared to be the first such ruling in any Western nation, the court ruled that a boy can legally have three parents. In that case the biological mother and father had parental rights and wished for the biological mother’s lesbian partner, who functions as the boy’s second mother, to have such rights as well.

The idea of assigning children three legal parents is not limited to North America. In 2005, expert commissions in Australia and New Zealand proposed that sperm or egg donors be allowed to “opt in” as a child’s third parent. That same year, scientists in Britain received state permission to create an embryo from the DNA of three adults, raising the real possibility that they all could be granted equal legal claims to the child if the embryo developed to term.

Astonishingly, few legal experts, politicians or social commentators have considered the enormous risks these rulings and proposals pose for children. Those who have noticed tend to say they are nothing new, because many children already grow up with several parent figures. But this fails to recognize that stepchildren and adopted children still have only two legal parents.

Supporters of the rulings argue that if two parents are good for children, aren’t three better? True, some three-parent petitions are brought by adults who appear deeply committed to the child in question. In the Ontario case, the two women and the father all seem devoted to the boy. But in Pennsylvania, the sperm donor, whom the children called “Papa,” was ordered to pay child support over his objections, and the lesbian co-mothers have already ended their relationship.

What is the harm if other American courts follow Pennsylvania’s example? For one thing, three-parent situations typically involve a couple and a third person living separately, meaning the child will get shuffled between homes, and this raises problems.

A few years ago, along with Norval Glenn, a sociologist at the University of Texas, I compiled the first nationwide study of children who grow up in so-called “good” divorces — that is, families in which both divorced parents stay involved in the child’s life and control their own conflict. We found that even these children must grow up traveling between two worlds, having to make sense on their own of the different values, beliefs and ways of living they find in each home. They have to grow up too soon. When a court assigns a child several parents, some of whom never intend to share a home, they consign that child, at best, to a “good” divorce situation.

Of course, sometimes the three adults might want to live together, which leads to a different set of concerns. As one advocate of polygamy argued in Newsweek, “If Heather can have two mommies, she should also be able to have two mommies and a daddy.” If more children are granted three legal parents, what is our rationale for denying these families the rights and protections of marriage? America, get ready for the group-marriage debate.

And these are merely the worries if the three parents cooperate. But, as the Pennsylvania case shows, they may not. Conflicts will undoubtedly arise when three parents confront the sticky, conflict-ridden reality of child-raising, often leading to a nasty, three-way custody battle. Even if they part amicably, they may still want to live in three different homes. In that case, how many homes should children travel between to satisfy the parenting needs of many adults?

Finally, why should courts stop at assigning children only three parents? Some situations involve a couple who wants the child, the sperm donor, the egg donor and the gestational surrogate who carries the pregnancy. If we allow three legal parents, why not five?

Fortunate children have many people who love them as much as their parents do. But in the best interests of children, no court should break open the rule of two when assigning legal parenthood.

Elizabeth Marquardt, a vice president of the Institute for American Values, is the author of the forthcoming “My Daddy’s Name Is Donor.”

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Killing the Regulator

Published: July 16, 2007
=================

The Chinese government’s extraordinary decision to execute its chief food and drug regulator for taking bribes and allowing the sale of tainted drugs is a perfect example of all that is wrong with China’s approach to regulation.

Beijing’s leaders — who disdain the idea of their own accountability — may think that killing the regulator is enough to reassure consumers at home and abroad that China is now ready to guarantee the safety of its products. But they’re wrong.

What China needs is an effective and transparent regulatory system and a clear understanding that its export boom will suffer if it continues to sell tainted food, toys and toothpaste. Until that happens — and there is no guarantee that it will — American regulators will have to do more to screen Chinese imports to protect American consumers.

China’s dysfunction has deep roots. The Communist Party leadership has muzzled consumer advocacy groups and the press. The government is also loath to do anything that might hinder the country’s breakneck economic growth. With no public accountability, shoddy companies are allowed to cut every possible corner in their pursuit of business, often under the protection of corrupt government officials.

The results include rivers laced with ammonia and toothpaste sweetened with an industrial solvent, as well as tainted antibiotics that have killed more than a dozen children and sickened hundreds. The good news is that for the first time China’s leaders are talking about the need for more and better regulation. And Washington and other governments can help with offers of technical advice and warnings about the cost of failing to take it.

But the scope of the problem is too big, too complex and too urgent for the United States — with $300 billion worth of Chinese imports a year — to wait for Beijing to act. American importers need to provide the first line of defense. Companies like Wal-Mart should send inspectors regularly to visit the factories of Chinese suppliers, to ensure that products are up to acceptable standards. Ultimately the American government will have to enforce these norms.

Unfortunately, the Bush administration has spent the last five-plus years emasculating the American regulatory system. The Consumer Product Safety Commission has seen its budgets repeatedly cut. The Food and Drug Administration has not received the resources it needs and today inspects only a minute share of all imported food.

It is hard to imagine anything good coming out of the China export scandals. But perhaps they will persuade Congress’s new Democratic leaders that America also needs a stronger and more transparent regulatory system.

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Don’t Laugh at Michael Chertoff

By FRANK RICH

Published: July 15, 2007
================

MICHAEL CHERTOFF, President Bush's fallback choice for secretary of Homeland Security after Bernard Kerik, is best remembered for his tragicomic performance during Hurricane Katrina. He gave his underling, the woeful Brownie, a run for the gold.

It was Mr. Chertoff who announced that the Superdome in New Orleans was "secure" even as the other half of the split screen offered graphic evidence otherwise. It was Mr. Chertoff who told NPR that he had "not heard a report of thousands of people in the convention center who do not have food and water," even after his fellow citizens had been inundated with such reports all day long.

With Brownie as the designated fall guy, Mr. Chertoff kept his job. Since then he has attracted notice only when lavishing pork on terrorist targets like an Alabama petting zoo while reducing grants to New York City. Though Mr. Chertoff may be the man standing between us and Armageddon, he is seen as a leader of stature only when standing next to his cabinet mate Gonzo.

But even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Last week, as the Bush administration frantically tried to counter Republican defections from the war in Iraq, Mr. Chertoff alone departed from the administration's script to talk about the enemy that actually did attack America on 9/11, Al Qaeda, rather than Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the jihad-come-lately gang Mr. Bush is fond of talking about instead. In this White House, the occasional official who strays off script is in all likelihood inadvertently coughing up the truth.

Mr. Chertoff was promptly hammered for it. His admission of "a gut feeling" that America might be vulnerable to a terrorist attack this summer was universally ridiculed as a gaffe. He then tried to retreat, but as he did so, his dire prognosis was confirmed by an intelligence leak. The draft of a new classified threat assessment found that Al Qaeda has regrouped and is stronger than at any time since 2001. Its operational base is the same ungoverned Pakistan wilderness where we've repeatedly failed to capture Osama bin Laden dead or alive for six years.

So give Mr. Chertoff credit for keeping his eye on the enemy while everyone else in the capital is debating never-to-be-realized benchmarks for an Iraqi government that exists in name only. Just as President Bush ignored that August 2001 brief "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," so Washington, some of its press corps included, is poised to shrug off the August 2007 update "Al Qaeda Better Positioned to Strike the West." The capital has been sucker-punched by the administration's latest P.R. offensive to prop up the fiasco in Iraq.

The White House's game is to create a new fictional story line to keep the war going until President Bush can dump it on his successor. Bizarrely, some of the new scenario echoes the bogus narrative used to sell the war in 2002: an imaginary connection between Iraq and the attacks of 9/11. You'd think the Bush administration might think twice before recycling old lies, but things have gotten so bad in the bunker that even Karl Rove is repeating himself.

Fittingly, one of the first in Washington to notice the rollout of the latest propaganda offensive was one of the very few journalists who uncovered the administration's manipulation of W.M.D. intelligence in 2002: Jonathan Landay of the McClatchy newspapers.

This time around, he was ahead of the pack in catching the sudden uptick in references to Al Qaeda in the president's speeches about Iraq — 27 in a single speech on June 28 — and an equal decline in references to the Sunni-Shiite sectarian violence at the heart of the Iraqi civil war America is powerless to stop. Even more incriminating was Mr. Landay's discovery that the military was following Mr. Bush's script verbatim. There were 33 citations of Al Qaeda in a single week's worth of military news releases in late June, up from only 9 such mentions in May.

None of this is accidental. The administration knows that its last stated mission for the war — "an Iraq that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself" — is as doomed as the Iraqi army that would "stand up" so we could stand down. So now there's a new "mission" — or at least new boilerplate. "Victory is defeating Al Qaeda," Tony Snow said last week, because "Al Qaeda continues to be the chief organizer of mayhem within Iraq." What's more, its members are, in Mr. Bush's words, "the ones who attacked us in America on September the 11th."

This is hooey, of course. Not only did Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia not exist before we invaded Iraq in 2003, but it isn't even the chief organizer of the war's mayhem today. ABC News reported this month that this group may be responsible for no more than 15 percent of the attacks in Iraq. Bob Woodward wrote in The Washington Post on Thursday that Michael Hayden, the C.I.A. director, told Mr. Bush last November that Al Qaeda was only the fifth most pressing threat in Iraq, after the insurgency, sectarian strife, criminality and general anarchy.

So what if the Qaeda that's operating with impunity out of Pakistan, North Africa and other non-Iraq havens actually is the most pressing threat to America? This president is never one to let facts get in the way of a political agenda. That agenda is to avoid taking responsibility for losing a war, no matter how many more Americans are tossed into its carnage. From here on in, you can be sure that whomever we're fighting in Iraq on any given day will be no more than one degree of separation from bin Laden.

Nor do the latest fictionalizations end there. To further prop up the war, Mr. Bush had to find some way to forestall verdicts on the "surge," which commanders had predicted could be judged by late summer. He also had to neutralize last week's downbeat Congress-mandated report card on the Iraqi government's progress toward its 18 benchmarks.

The latter task was easy. The report card grades on a steep curve (and even then must settle for a C-minus average and a couple of incompletes). Deflecting gloom about the "surge" is trickier. It's hard to argue that we're on our way to securing Baghdad, the stated goal, when attacks on our own safe haven, the Green Zone, are rising rapidly, more than doubling from March to May, according to the United Nations.

But you can never underestimate this White House's ingenuity. It turns out that the "surge," which most Americans thought began shortly after the president announced it in January, is brand-new! We're just "at the starting line," Tony Snow told the network morning news shows last week, as he pounded in the message that "we have a new course in Iraq, and it's two weeks old."

Mr. Snow's television hosts were not so rude as to point out that the Pentagon had previously designated Feb. 14 as the starting line of the surge's first operation, and had also said that its March report on Iraq should be used as the "baseline from which to measure future progress." That was then, and this is now. The Baghdad clock has been reset. July is the new February. As we slouch toward the sixth anniversary of 9/11, the war against Al Qaeda has only just begun.

Swamped with such fiction, Washington is unable to cope. Network newscasts are still failing to distinguish the Qaeda Mr. Bush talks about from the 9/11 terrorists. The Iraq dead-enders in Congress and the neocon punditocracy have now defined victory down to defeating Mr. Bush's mini-Qaeda in a single Iraqi province, Anbar. Meanwhile, our ally Pervez Musharraf's shaky regime in Pakistan lets Al Qaeda plot its next mass murder.

The capital's entire political debate over Iraq — stay-the-surge versus "precipitous withdrawal" — is itself pure hot air. Even though felons and the obese are now being signed up to meet Army recruitment shortfalls, we still can't extend the surge past next April, when troops for Iraq run out unless Mr. Bush extends their tours yet again. "Precipitous withdrawal" (which no withdrawal bill in Congress calls for) is a non sequitur, since any withdrawal would take at least 10 months. Rather than have the real debate about how to manage the exit, politically panicked Republicans hope to cast symbolic votes that will allow them to tell voters they were for ending the war before they prolonged it.

That leaves Mr. Chertoff, whose department has vacancies in a quarter of its top leadership positions, as the de facto general in charge of defending us from the enemy he had that "gut feeling" about, the Qaeda not in Iraq. Last week we learned from a sting operation conducted by Congressional investigators that this enemy needs only a Mail Boxes Etc. account, a phone and a fax machine to buy radioactive material from American suppliers and build a dirty bomb.

For all Washington's hyperventilating about the Iraqi Parliament's vacation plans, it's our own government's vacation from reality this summer that should make us very afraid.

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Who’s Sorry Now?

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: July 15, 2007
=================

WASHINGTON

There’s not much lately that we’d like to import from China.

Certainly not the yummy steamed buns stuffed with shredded cardboard soaked in a caustic agent used to make soap. Or the tasty toothpaste laced with an antifreeze ingredient. Or the scrumptious seafood with a chemical kick. Or those pet foods with kibbles and bits of poison.

But there is one thing made in China we could use: mea culpas of high officials.

Zheng Xiaoyu, a top regulator who helped create China’s Food and Drug Administration, accepted $850,000 in bribes from drug companies and became enmeshed in the mistakes that flooded the market with dangerous drugs. Before he was executed Tuesday, he wrote a short confession titled “How I Look on My Mistakes.”

“Thinking back on what has happened these years, I start to see the problems clearly,” he wrote in prison. “Why are the friends who gave me money all the bosses of pharmaceutical companies? Obviously because I was in charge of drug administration.

“I am confessing here that I loosened self-discipline, ignored the bottom line,” he said, adding that he had to confess his mistakes “as an act of saving my soul.”

We would skip the execution — although perhaps there should be ranch arrest for W., and Cheney could do community service passing out condoms at Gay Pride festivals.

But it is time for the lethally inept duo running the country to do some painstaking self-examination and confession. Just as the Communist Party helped the late Mr. Zheng compose his thoughts, I volunteer to ghost-write our leaders’ self-scrutiny:

“How I Look on My Mistakes,” by George W. Bush

The people trusted me with an important position. I didn’t live up to expectations. I let Dick supersize the executive branch and cast Democrats as whiners and traitors. Why did I not suspect that Dick might be power-hungry when he appointed himself vice president? Why did I let him take over my presidency and fill it up with warmongers? I was so afraid to be called a wimp, as my father once was, I allowed Dick and Rummy to turn me into a wimp. I should never have allowed Dick to conspire with energy lobbyists and steer contracts to Halliburton. A tip-off should have been when Dick kept giving himself all the same powers that I had. Or when he outed that pretty lady spy.

If only I had kept my promise to go after the thugs who attacked us on 9/11, because now I’ve made Osama and Al Qaeda stronger. I know my false claim about Al Qaeda’s ties with Iraq led to Iraq’s being tied down by Al Qaeda. I see now that my bungled war on terror has created more terror, empowered Iran and made America less secure. Oh, yeah, and I’m sorry I broke the military.

I stained the family honor when I ignored the elders of the Iraq Study Group. I should not have worried that I would be seen as kowtowing to my dad’s friends. The Oval Office is not the right place for a teenage rebellion.

I should not have picked that dimwit Brownie, and I should have trusted the gut of anyone besides that goof-off Chertoff to keep the nation safe. And what was I thinking when I said Harriet Miers should be a Supreme Court justice? That was loony. I’m sorry I made the surgeon general mention my name three times on every page of his speeches. That was childish.

How could I have let Dick bring in his best friend, Rummy, my dad’s old nemesis? Dummy Rummy let Osama escape at Tora Bora, messed up the Iraq occupation and aborted a mission to wipe out top Al Qaeda leaders because he was protecting Musharraf, who was protecting Al Qaeda in the tribal areas. Even though I promised to get rid of dictators who helped terrorists, I ended up embracing a Pakistani dictator who helps terrorists.

I’m embarrassed that the Iraqi Parliament is taking a monthlong vacation in the middle of my surge. Could I have set a bad example when I rode my bike in Crawford while New Orleans drowned?

I’m sorry I keep pretending Iraq will get better if we stay longer. It wasn’t very nice of me to push the surge when I knew it couldn’t work. I just wanted to dump the defeat on my successor. I wish Hillary the best of luck.

If I had left the gym long enough to read about Algeria or even one of T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, then I might have not gotten bogged down in Iraq and let North Korea, China and Russia slide.

Being the Decider is so confusing. I regret stealing the presidency and wish I could give it back.

“How I Look on My Mistakes,” by Dick Cheney

Buzz off.

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The Green Road Less Traveled

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: July 15, 2007
====================

Whoever knew — I.B.M. is managing traffic congestion in Stockholm. Well it is, and therein lies a story.

Probably the biggest green initiative coming down the road these days, literally, is congestion pricing — charging people for the right to drive into a downtown area. It is already proving to be the most effective short-term way to clean up polluted city air, promote energy efficiency and create more livable urban centers, while also providing mayors with unexpected new revenue.

Imagine a day when you will go online and buy a pass to drive into any major urban area and the price of your pass will be set by whether you are driving a hybrid or a Hummer, the time of day you want to drive, the road you want to use and how much carbon your car trip will emit. And if there is an accident on the route you normally take, an alert will be sent to a device in your car warning you to go a different way.

Well, that day is pretty much here for London, Stockholm and Singapore — and New York City could be next. In a few years, the notion that you will be able to get into your car in the suburbs and drive downtown for free will be as old-fashioned as horses and buggies.

But what does this have to do with I.B.M.? To make congestion pricing work, you need technology — cameras, software and algorithms that can read auto license plates as they flash by and automatically charge the driver or check whether he or she has paid the fee to enter the city center. (The data is regularly destroyed to protect privacy.) That is what I.B.M. is providing for the city of Stockholm, which, after a successful seven-month trial in which traffic dropped more than 20 percent, will move to full congestion pricing in August.

“In Stockholm, we built a system where we have a ring of cameras around the city — 18 entry points with multiple lanes,” explained Jamie Houghton, I.B.M.’s global leader for road charging, based in London. “I.B.M. Stockholm runs the whole system.”

O.K., Friedman, so I.B.M. is now in the traffic biz. Who cares?

I care, because it underscores a fundamental truth about green technology: you can’t make a product greener, whether it’s a car, a refrigerator or a traffic system, without making it smarter — smarter materials, smarter software or smarter design.

What can many U.S. companies still manufacture? They can manufacture things that are smart — that have a lot of knowledge content in them, like a congestion pricing network for a whole city. What do many Chinese companies manufacturer? They manufacture things that can be made with a lot of cheap labor, like the rubber tires on your car. Which jobs are most easily outsourced? The ones vulnerable to cheap labor. Which jobs are hardest to outsource? Those that require a lot of knowledge.

So what does all this mean? It means that to the extent that we make “green” standards part of everything we design and manufacture, we create “green collar” jobs that are much more difficult to outsource. I.B.M. and other tech companies are discovering a mother lode of potential new business for their high-wage engineers and programmers thanks to the fact that mayors all over the world are thinking about going green through congestion pricing systems.

“Congestion pricing of traffic is emerging as a completely new services market for I.B.M.,” said Mr. Houghton. “I.B.M. is in discussion with major cities worldwide, including some in China.”

Hopefully, if the New York State Legislature acts, New York City will get access to a $500 million Department of Transportation grant for a pilot congestion pricing system. The more U.S. cities adopt congestion pricing, the more U.S. companies will quickly develop the expertise in this field, which is going to be a huge growth industry on a planet where more and more people will be living in cities. Congestion pricing is the only way to make them livable without trillions of dollars of new infrastructure.

As New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who’s trying to bring this system to his city, put it to me: “The percentage of your working day spent in a commute will go down and the time you spend being productive and being paid, or simply relaxing, will go up. Also, more people will do business in the city, because they can get to stores, offices or the theater more easily.”

So if you hear a politician say that we can’t afford to impose green standards because it will cost us jobs, tell them: “Hogwash.” The more we elevate, expand and globalize green, clean-power standards the more we play to the strengths of the American economy, American jobs and American-based companies.

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A Community Swap Meet, on Your AM Radio Station

“We’ll have someone selling antiques. And the very next call
is someone wanting to sell their chickens.” DENNIS NELSON

By DAN BARRY

Published: July 15, 2007
==================

SYLVA, N.C.

Another noon hour is drawing to a close at the small radio station beside the railroad track, 680 on the AM dial, your home for today’s hits and yesterday’s favorites. Listeners have heard the news, weather, sports and a reminder to visit Andy Shaw Ford, across from the Wal-Mart. It’s time again for that thousand-watt form of communion, Tradio.

The host, Dennis the Menace, leans toward the microphone the way he might to confide in his life’s companion. His voice, chain-smoker deep, assumes the broadcasting cadence that tries to evoke folksy familiarity but somehow comes out sounding like God trying hard to just shoot the breeze.

“Well, it’s a good time to do Tradio, so let’s do it,” he says, to maybe 1,500 listeners. “Looking to buy, sell, trade or give away? Well, give us a call, and we’ll try to help you out.”

Remember, the number to call is 586-WRGC, as in WRGC-AM.

And the residents of Sylva, population 2,500, call. So do their neighbors in the surrounding hamlets and hollows of the Great Smoky Mountains in western North Carolina, where radio signals can come and go like snippets of dreams. For 15 minutes every weekday afternoon, people talk, listen and connect, all through a kind of radio-wave eBay called Tradio.

“Hello there,” says Dennis the Menace. “You’re first on Tradio.”

Callers can say they have a sofa, a car or a goat to sell. They can say they’re looking for a power saw, a bicycle or a goat to buy. They can promote a yard sale or ask that people keep an eye out for a beloved horse that’s gone wandering. Some call so often with the same items for sale that the host, whose given name is Dennis Nelson, hears the voice and instantly knows the rest.

“And I got a lamp for $20,” a regular caller says on this afternoon.

“And some end tables,” Mr. Nelson says.

“Yes.”

“See, I remember these things.”

“And a fish tank.”

“Oh yes,” Mr. Nelson says, recalling. “A fish tank — with fish.”

“Yes,” the caller answers.

Programs like Tradio — the Swap Shop, for example, or Tell It and Sell It — appear on small stations around the country. They usually prohibit the sale of bedding, firearms and animal husbandry, and often hint of curious interior lives. Not long ago, a car radio casting for a signal in West Virginia snagged a program in which a female caller was looking to sell a house, 16 acres, a bowling ball and a sequin dress slit up the side.

Here in Sylva, where WRGC’s power drops to 250 watts at sunset, Tradio may well be the most popular program on the air. “We get anything and everything,” says Will Candler, the station’s 26-year-old operations manager. “Matter of fact, I bought a lawn mower off of it. Use it to this day.”

Mr. Candler is also the morning show host and an ad salesman, which is the way things are at small stations: many tasks being handled by a few, all for the thrill of achieving that almost spiritual state of being called “on the air.” The other half-dozen employees at WRGC include the hosts, Dennis the Menace and Frank “The Byrdman” Byrd, with Charlie Bauder on the news and Brandon Stephens, “the Voice of the Mustangs,” on sports.

From Mr. Candler’s modest office in the modest station headquarters, you can see a horse named Kitty grazing in a nearby field and feel the tremble as another freight train grinds its way past to a local paper mill. “It comes about three times a day,” he says. “We try not to have the mike on when it comes through.”

Back to Tradio, sponsored by Savannah Farms Nursery and the Rusty Lizard bar. Down the steps, past shelved rows of thousands of black discs that haven’t spun on a turntable in years — from the Gospel Melody Singers singing about the Lord to Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty singing “You Done Lost Your Baby” — and into the wall-carpeted control room. There, the white-bearded Mr. Nelson sips a Mountain Dew and leans in again as if to share endearments with that microphone.

“Tradio, whether you’re lookin’ to buy, sell, trade or give away,” he says. “Perhaps a stray pet has wandered into your area. Well, maybe you want to try to find the owner. Or, heaven forbid, you’ve lost a pet. Well, we’ll try to help you.”

Mr. Nelson, 58, has worked at so many stations over so many years that their call letters seem to run together into one alphabetical jumble. He used to resist his nickname but has since come to embrace minor celebrity; “Dennis the Menace” appears on the shirt he’s wearing and on the front license plate of his pickup truck parked near the railroad tracks.

He lives with five cats in “the last house in the holler” and sees Tradio as a conversation with a community of both the rich and the poor. “We’ll have someone selling antiques,” he says during a break. “And the very next call is someone wanting to sell their chickens.”

Eighty-four degrees in Sylva, skies are bright and “it’s your turn on Tradio.” Someone has a refrigerator for sale, with ice maker. Someone has a 1997 Pontiac Grand Am, in good condition. Someone has 650 concrete blocks but leaves unclear the small matter of delivery.

Dennis the Menace returns after a commercial break. And with that deep, almost unreal voice of his, he invites another of us to join him on the air.

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Subprime, Subpar: For Sale?

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

Published: July 15, 2007
======================

NOVASTAR FINANCIAL, a subprime mortgage originator based in Kansas City, Mo., has had its share of setbacks. That’s not surprising, given the carnage in its industry.

What is surprising? NovaStar’s stock has been on a tear lately, rising from $3.80 in February to $7.63, at Friday’s close. Even though the mortgage lending business continues to sink and shrink, NovaStar’s market valuation has risen.

Perhaps that is because, last April, NovaStar said it was seeking “strategic alternatives” — otherwise known as a “lifeline.” The stock is up about 50 percent since then. Some investors may believe a buyout lies ahead. Last week, there were whispers that the MassMutual Corporation, a financial services firm that trades as a closed-end investment company, might put money into NovaStar.

The two companies are already connected. Babson Capital, a money management unit owned by MassMutual, is a big NovaStar shareholder; it owns about 770,000 shares, or 2 percent of the company. Most of those shares were bought in 2006; the average cost to Babson is $27.85 a share.

Another interesting tie: Howard B. Hill, a managing director at Babson since 2005, was a vocal bull on NovaStar for years, posting messages on Yahoo and other stock boards until about the time he joined Babson. Like John P. Mackey, the chief executive of Whole Foods Market, who used Internet chat rooms to promote his point of view, Mr. Hill has been an avid poster on stock message boards.

Unlike Mr. Mackey, Mr. Hill used his last name while posting. He urged investors to buy NovaStar shares, with the stock symbol of NFI, for its dividend. One post that Mr. Hill made on Yahoo was headed “NFI gets positive returns every year.”

Mr. Hill pretty much quit posting messages about NovaStar after he joined Babson. But on June 6, 2006, he wrote on the Yahoo board: “I’m more bullish than I’ve been for more than a year on the group and NFI, but that’s all I can or will say on that.” NovaStar’s shares were at $31.29 that day.

Officials at MassMutual Financial Group and Babson, including Mr. Hill, declined to comment. NovaStar declined to comment as well.

While NovaStar might appear to be a unlikely takeover target, we all know that anything can happen in mergerland. Still, NovaStar’s business is plummeting, and it faces a number of legal challenges. Its monthly loan figures for June, disclosed last Thursday, show total originations of $254 million, down from $1.06 billion for the same period last year. The company generated an average of $12.1 million in loans each day last month; in June 2006, that daily figure was $48.2 million, albeit with one more day in the month.

Delinquencies among the company’s loans, meanwhile, are rocketing. In June, some 12.4 percent of loans in pools less than one year old were more than 30 days delinquent. That’s up from 5.2 percent at the end of 2006.

Furthermore, NovaStar has problems that other lenders don’t. On June 27, for example, the company lost a lawsuit in California that will require it and two other lenders to pay $46 million. A jury ruled in favor of American Interbanc and its contention that NovaStar Home Mortgage Inc., a subsidiary, used bait-and-switch practices in its mortgage-quote Web site. (NovaStar shut down its subsidiary in mid-2006.) Lanny J. Davis, a lawyer at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe who represents NovaStar, said the company believes the verdict is incorrect and has sought to have it reversed.

On other legal fronts, the company settled a class-action suit in Washington State on June 27, paying $5 million to some 1,600 borrowers who contended that NovaStar hid loan fees, according to Ari Brown, the lawyer at Bergman & Frockt in Seattle that represented them. A $5 million settlement certainly doesn’t cripple NovaStar, but it may just be the beginning of such suits. While NovaStar had only a small presence in Washington, it generated more loans in California than in any other state. And Mr. Brown has also sued NovaStar on behalf of two California borrowers who contend that its loan carried hidden commissions — meaning that the suit may become a class action there.

THE Washington case was settled to avoid unnecessary legal expenses, Mr. Davis said, “but there was no admission whatsoever that any of the claims made in that case were meritorious.” The company maintains that loan fees were fully disclosed to borrowers and that they did not suffer actual damages because they would have had to pay those fees or more in any event.

“Regarding the California case, we are confident it is utterly baseless, its allegations misstate facts and have no merits, and that the transactions referenced in that case were entirely consistent with California law,” Mr. Davis said.

If MassMutual does indeed invest more in NovaStar, it would be a vote of confidence in the company and in subprime lending. Mr. Hill, the Babson managing director, is, as his online postings show, a fan of NovaStar and its industry. On Jan. 24, he published a report on Babson’s own Web site about subprime mortgage securities. Calling the press coverage of the sector “unrelentingly depressing,” Mr. Hill argued for a more upbeat view.

“We look at the glass as being 90 percent full now, with the potential to drop to only 80 percent,” he wrote. “What we find is that people do not generally lose their homes to foreclosure, even if the mortgage balance is higher than the market price of the house. Basically, if they have jobs, they pay their mortgages.”

That rule of thumb worked in previous periods but seems not to be working now. In the more than six months since Mr. Hill wrote his report, foreclosures have risen significantly, notwithstanding strong employment figures.

Mr. Hill declined to talk with me last week about NovaStar, his postings on the company and Babson’s investment. But in an interview with Bloomberg News on Friday he called coverage of the subprime mortgage meltdown “a bit overblown.”

Certainly NovaStar’s shareholders would love to see MassMutual, or anyone whose money is green, throw them a line. But would it be good for MassMutual’s investors?

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Supporters See Innocent Man Serving Life

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: July 15, 2007
==================

WEST HARTFORD, Conn.

He is short, clumsy and mentally impaired, with thick glasses and hearing aids in both ears, given to telling the same stale jokes over and over. His nickname was Mr. Magoo. He once was a dishwasher. He’s now a convict serving a life term for rape and murder.

They are people who befriended him without knowing him: advocates for the disabled, lawyers, writers, a detective, nurses, business people, psychologists, teachers, perhaps 100 in all at different times, a core group of perhaps 25. For years, many of them met every other Wednesday at the Burger King in Wethersfield near here to plot strategy.

They have long since abandoned the Burger King. Some of them have died. But 15 years later, the Friends of Richard Lapointe have not abandoned Mr. Lapointe, who was convicted of crimes they say he could not have committed.

After years of legal setbacks, Mr. Lapointe has a hearing beginning Monday in Superior Court in the Tolland Judicial District seeking a new trial on grounds of ineffective counsel and suppressed evidence. Two remarkable stories will play out. The first is an uphill legal one that reflects the enormous hurdles facing any convict lacking the game-over DNA evidence that has freed more than 200 inmates in recent years. The second is a human one, how the Friends of Richard Lapointe have kept the faith all these years, sticking by a humble dishwasher like family when he was poised to disappear forever.

“These are people responding with absolutely pure hearts, who have put their money where their mouth is, their time where their mouth is, for someone they didn’t even know,” said Kate Germond, a lawyer with Centurion Ministries, which has had enormous success in freeing wrongfully convicted prisoners and is defending Mr. Lapointe. “They’re heroes. They really are.”

The case began on March 8, 1987, when Bernice Martin, 88, of Manchester, was raped, stabbed 11 times and strangled, and her apartment set on fire. She was the grandmother of Mr. Lapointe’s wife and someone with whom he regularly watched Red Sox and Celtics games.

For two years, the case went unsolved. On July 4, 1989, Mr. Lapointe, then 43, was preparing for a picnic with his wife and 9-year-old son. The police called and asked him to come down to talk about the case. He’d be back in time for the picnic, they said. When he arrived he was confronted with a bewildering display of exhibits and evidence, much of it bogus, purporting to prove he was the killer.

He was interrogated for nine hours, until 1:30 in the morning. No recording was made. During that time he signed three inconsistent confessions. He later said he signed them so he could go to the bathroom or leave. The first said he was responsible for the death but it was an accident, and his mind went blank. The second said if the evidence showed he did it, he did it, but “I don’t remember being there.” The third had details of the crime, some consistent with known facts, some not. At a 1992 trial, he was found guilty of capital felony murder and eight other charges. That should have been the end of it.

But one of those attending the trial was Robert Perske, a writer with a special interest in cases involving people with mental disabilities. He watched in horror, convinced that Mr. Lapointe was being railroaded on the basis of coerced confessions. He sent an alert to some friends, who attended the trial, too. When it ended, they raised money for appeals, visited Mr. Lapointe in prison, hired lawyers, generated publicity, organized a forum on wrongful convictions.

They say the case is preposterous, that Mr. Lapointe, a victim of numerous mental and physical infirmities, was not capable of such conduct. They say to commit a crime of astounding brutality, Mr. Lapointe, who had no history of violence of any kind, would have decided to sneak out in a 45-minute interval while his wife and son were upstairs. He would have taken a short walk to Mrs. Martin’s apartment, raped her, stabbed her, strangled her with a ligature that required far more dexterity than he had ever shown and set the place on fire.

And then, with no one seeing him come or go, he would have returned home, with no wounds, no blood, no smell of smoke, in time to calmly watch a National Geographic special with his family.

“He didn’t do it, he wouldn’t do it, he couldn’t do it,” said Irv Hargrave, a retired business executive who is one of the supporters.

Supporters of Richard Lapointe
at one of their frequent meetings.
***************

The jury disagreed. Michael O’Hare, the assistant state attorney supervising the case, said the confessions, a semen sample found at the crime scene consistent with Mr. Lapointe’s blood type and statements he made the night of the murder (which the state contends reflected knowledge of the crime not available at the time) provided ample evidence, and that Mr. Lapointe received excellent counsel. Because of the heat from the fire, no identifiable DNA was recovered.

“I’m sure they’re well-meaning,” he said of Mr. Lapointe’s supporters. “But I don’t believe their beliefs are supported by the evidence, which shows he is guilty and was properly convicted.”

The legal obstacles facing his primary lawyer, Paul Casteleiro, in seeking a new trial are daunting. His supporters could be excused if the whole thing is feeling Sisyphean or worse.

It’s been a long, long road without much to show for it, but some of them met this week to discuss the case and plan what they’ll do if he’s released. Mr. Lapointe still talks about the lobster dinner he ate once at Red Lobster. They’d like to get him a second one.

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The Opinionator: A blog at the New York Times by Tobin Harshaw & Chris Suellenthorp

July 13, 2007, 4:06 pm

Supreme Court Dreams

By Tobin Harshaw

Tags: Supreme Court

While Iraq, global warming and surgeons general dominated the front pages this week, the steady rumbling sound you heard echoing through the blogosphere was all about the now-finished first term of the John Roberts’s Supreme Court. The gauntlet was thrown down most brazenly [$] by Jeffrey Rosen in The New Republic, who asks the big question: “The polarization inspired the four liberal justices to write some of their most passionate, incisive, and memorable dissents. But how pessimistic should liberals really be about the future of the Court?”

Rosen’s answer is cautious, but not panic-inducing for Democrats. Other liberals are far more skeptical: “Rosen now wants us to believe that he was making some kind of point about political realism,” replies Matthew Yglesias, “but that’s not what was going on. People were writing, in the face of the evidence, that Roberts marked a clear break with Scalia. And we’re seeing that he unquestionably is a break in prose style but he makes the same rulings.”

Scott Lemieux at Tapped goes further. “The Alito/Roberts method is, if anything, even worse for liberals than the Scalia/Thomas one: it achieves the same results while attracting less public scrutiny,” writes Lemieux “It’s worth noting that Alito and Roberts did not join the one “narrowing” opinion of any substantive significance: Kennedy’s refusal to go along with the ‘color-blind’ majority in the school desegregation cases.”

David Sirota looks back in anger: “Back when George Bush was nominating people like John Roberts and Sam Alito to the Supreme Court, I wrote a series of posts (here’s one) wondering why Democrats and progressives weren’t focusing more on what these two right-wing nominees would do to basic economic policy. Now, with them on the court, we get an idea why I was so worried about this.”

While Tom Goldstein at Scotusblog looks forward with hope: “My ultimate predictions? Kim Wardlaw (2009, for Souter), Deval Patrick (2010, for Stevens), and Elena Kagan (2011, for Ginsburg).”

The wishful thinking from the left was largely in reaction to Linda Greenhouse’s article in The Times about efforts on the left to build “a long-term strategy built around an affirmative message of what the Constitution means and what the enterprise of constitutional interpretation should be about.”

Ann Althouse can see why the idea of a “heroic” court is tempting, but thinks it doesn’t pass the reality check. “This grand vision for a Court that would expansively and actively enforce rights will be seen by present day voters as a political proposal,” she writes on her blog. “If people today really want that vision, they can get it from the political branches. They don’t need a reactivated liberal Court. The liberal lawprofs’ dream seems to be that you could get people to believe that the expansive vision of rights is the proper way to do constitutional interpretation and they’d be willing to go along with that even if they didn’t want these rights enough to support enacting them into law through statutes. But what are the chances that people today would allow liberal academics to convince them of such a thing?”

Indeed — and in any case, liberals can do all the plotting they want, but it doesn’t look like Messrs. Roberts, Alito, Scalia and Thomas are going away any time soon.

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The Opinionator: A blog at the New York Times by Tobin Harshaw & Chris Suellenthorp

July 13, 2007, 9:25 am

Seekers of the Middle Path

By Tobin Harshaw

Tags: worth a click

• A Third Way on Iraq? “Moderate Democrats and politically vulnerable Senate Republicans who want change in Iraq — but fear being lumped together with the anti-war crowd — have been desperately searching for an alternative,” reports Martin Kady II at CQPolitics.

  “Thirteen senators are pushing to modify the defense authorization bill (HR 1585) by adding the recommendations by the Iraq Study Group. Those include a redeployment of troops — from combat status to trainers of Iraqi forces — but without binding timetables. Neither Senate party leader has embraced the measure … The resistance from party leaders, however, is one of the reasons senators have embraced the measure: It offers them cover from both sides of a divisive debate.”

  The Times’s editorial on Sunday that had no interest in compromise, calling for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, has generated plenty of discussion. Victor Davis Hanson, writing at City Journal, takes his shot: “It is rare that an editorial gets almost everything wrong, but ‘The Road Home’ pulls it off. Consider, point by point, its confused—and immoral—defeatism.”

• Amazon and Oprah: “If you’ve written a book anytime in the last ten years, you’ve probably become intimately familiar with your Amazon.com sales rank — it doesn’t reveal how many copies are selling, but it’s instant feedback on how well you’re promoting your book,” notes John J. Miller at The Corner.

  “Does your rank improve when you appear on TV? (The answer is almost always yes, though some shows are much better than others.) How about when you write an op-ed for a major metropolitan paper, or appear on a local radio station? (Much more ambiguous.)”

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Domestic Disturbances: A blog at the NY Times by Judith Warner

July 12, 2007, 6:59 pm

Visiting Day

Tags: parental guilt, showing up, working parents

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I went to Visiting Day at my daughters’ day camp this week.

I had a lovely time.

I used some of the mindfulness meditation techniques that I’d learned recently in Yoga Nidra to keep out of my mind thoughts of the two-foot-high stack of papers I was scheduled to go through that day, which was one of exactly nine days I’d set aside for working on my now-two-years-overdue book.

The techniques worked very well. I was present to myself and my daughters, relished the feeling of the cold pool water on my skin, sang along heartily with the camp songs and, when asked to participate in gymnastics, connected so well to my long-betrayed inner child that I found myself cowering behind my daughter Emilie’s back, hoping that, if I dropped my eyes to the floor, I’d become fully invisible.

(As a teenager, I applied for a job as a camp counselor once. Under skills, I put “typing.” Not much has changed.)

I am fortunate to have a profession that, on non-deadline days, doesn’t require me to be in any particular place producing work at any particular time. If I miss a couple of hours of work or even an entire day no one necessarily notices – though my anxiety level is sure to rise and my bank account, if the situation drags on, is sure to dip.

Other people – most people – don’t live their work lives that way.

“My dad promised he’d come,” one of the 7-year-old girls complained, as we crowded together on Emilie’s towel, sharing cookies and Ritz Bits and sandwiches — in that order, unfortunately — at lunchtime. “He always breaks his promises.”

“My parents always break their promises, too,” another lunch companion chimed in.

Their eyes fell on Emilie.

“You know how it feels, Em,” said the first. “Your dad isn’t here, either.”

Indeed, he wasn’t. He couldn’t be. Max had a story closing that day and was chained to his desk.
“What’s more important to him – work or us?” 10-year-old Julia had cried when I’d told her, the week before, that he wasn’t going to be able to attend.

We were in the car. It was the post-camp-bus-pickup cranky hour, and we were all a bit testy. It was also the end of a work period for me in which I’d been reading a whole lot about family leave – about the 40 percent of Americans who have none; the 50 percent who have no right to sick days; the 25 percent who get no vacation. I let Julia have it.

Don’t you think that Daddy would rather be running around with you in the woods than sitting at his desk in front of a computer screen? I snapped.

I lectured her on the unfairness of judging parents for things that were beyond their control. I lectured her on the injustice of presenting parents with demands that they can’t meet. I peppered her with rhetorical questions: Does the fact that I, with my flexible schedule, can manage to take a day off from work make me a “better” mother than another woman who can’t?

“Okay, okay,” Julia said, staring glumly out the window. “I get it.”

“Can we pause this now?” Emilie chimed in. “Can we listen to ‘Harry Potter’?”

Conversations about parents who break promises or let their kids down or generally make them feel less important than work shouldn’t be common. But they are. I hear snippets of them every time I attend a school event during the workday. And I’m fed up. I’ve just about had it.

But not with the ill-accused parents.

I’ve had it with a culture that willfully refuses to face up to the fact that almost 80 percent of mothers with children beyond pre-school age – and, of course, a much greater percentage of fathers – work. This refusal to face facts, coupled with the ideology of “parental involvement” as a panacea for all social ills, has created a situation in which not only guilt-ridden parents, but children are needlessly suffering.

It doesn’t need to be this way. It only takes a quick look across the Atlantic to see that many other countries have done what’s necessary to grow up and embrace the 21st century. They provide kids with a longer school year, a longer school day and subsidized summer activities. And they consider that a parent’s place is in the home – not in the classroom.

Parental involvement is key for school and life success and truly does need to be encouraged in struggling communities where parents aren’t able to be hands-on enough in their kids’ lives. But that’s simply not an issue for most middle- and upper-middle-class people.

Whatever need these parents have to “be there” for their kids 24/7 (and no one is more guilty of such neediness than me), we’ve got, for the greater good, to counterbalance it against the realization that meeting these needs – constantly – is creating an unfair situation in which some kids are left feeling like second-class citizens. (And if you think that young kids whose parents don’t show up for daytime events don’t feel – at least briefly – like second-class citizens, you’re wrong. They do.)

We need to push back against the trend toward excessive and inappropriate parental involvement that weighs so heavily upon families in certain communities. We should start by requesting – ever so politely – that school events requiring parental participation be scheduled in the evening. Or on weekends. And not too often at that.

Let’s get parents out of their school-aged kids’ 9-to-3 lives. It’s a cost-free solution to one of the major sources of family angst today. And, more globally, let’s grow up as a culture and face reality – so that our kids can grow up less stressfully.

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Poor Kids Living in a War Zone

By BOB HERBERT

Published: July 14, 2007
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Chicago

The colorful playground outside Frederick Funston Elementary School has swings and sliding boards and a heartbreaking makeshift memorial for the 13-year-old girl who was shot to death in the playground a few weeks ago.

“It’s difficult out here,” said a woman who sat on a bench, watching her two small boys scampering around the playground.

What she meant was that there was nothing particularly unusual about schoolchildren getting blown away in Chicago’s black and Latino neighborhoods. Since September, when the last school year started, dozens of this city’s public school students have been murdered, most of them shot to death. As of last week, the toll of public schoolchildren slain in Chicago since the opening of the school year had reached 34, including two killed since the schools closed for summer vacation.

“That’s more than a kid every two weeks,” said Arne Duncan, the chief executive of the city’s school system. “Think about that.”

The girl killed in the playground was Schanna Gayden, who, according to the police, was shot in the head by a gang member who was aiming at someone else. Blair Holt, a high school junior, was shot to death on a city bus. Another teenager was killed as he walked home from a library.

Lazarus Jones, a 13-year-old computer-lover who was looking forward to beginning high school in the fall, was jumped by several members of a gang and beaten to death. Twelve-year-old Laura Joslin was stabbed to death, police said, by an 18-year-old girl on Thanksgiving Day. Victor Casillas, 15, was killed in a drive-by shooting.

And so on.

This should be a major national story, of course, and it would be if the slain children had come from more privileged backgrounds. But these are the kids that most of America cares nothing about — black, Latin and poor.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper covered the story. He said of the kids, poignantly: “Their names should be known. Their lives should be honored. Their deaths should be remembered.”

But that was an exception. Outside of Chicago, very little reporting has been done on this horrifying wave of murders. The truth, of course, is that Chicago is not alone. It may be jolting, even in our blood-drenched society, to have so many students from one school system killed over the course of a single school year. But most people know (and take for granted) that boys and girls growing up in America’s inner cities often have to deal with conditions that can fairly be compared to combat.

“There’s just a tremendous amount of passivity and a lack of public outrage,” said Mr. Duncan, a fierce champion of efforts to control the relentless arming of Americans — young and old, rich and poor — with firearms.

“No one even talks about all the kids who are shot but not killed,” he said. He mentioned a 7-year-old who was shot at a family barbecue. “The amount of trauma these kids and their families are living with is just staggering,” he said.

We know at least some of the things that need to be done about the slaughter of poor children in the U.S.

Mr. Duncan is surely right when he says that the easy availability of guns is roughly the equivalent of spraying gasoline on an already fiery situation. The effect of the guns is to make a bad situation much, much worse.

Beyond the guns, apart from the horrifying fact that they might meet up with a bullet at any time, poor youngsters are suffering from a ruthless pattern of abuse and neglect that has lasted for many years.

Too few have been afforded the benefits of a quality education. Too many are left to their own devices because of an absence of after-school programs and other kinds of activities — clubs, sports, art and music programs, summer camps — that can enrich the lives of children and shield them from harm.

Summer jobs programs have been decimated by the federal government.

And in far too many cases, the very people who should be caring for these youngsters the most, their parents, have walked away from their most fundamental responsibilities. Fathers, especially, have abandoned their young in droves.

Life is not fair. Society will not make these vulnerable youngsters whole. We all have a responsibility, but the kids desperately need those closest to them to step up, especially the ones who gave them life.

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